The present invention relates in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field.
An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is computer software used to help computer programmers develop code. IDEs normally include a source code editor (either a text or modeling-language-based editor in a first pane of a User Interface—“UI”), a compiler and/or interpreter (underlying software not shown in the UI), build-automation tools (including modeling languages), and a debugger (in a second pane in the UI). The UI often includes a class browser, an object inspector and a class hierarchy (tree) diagram for use with object oriented software development.
The tree diagram presents a relational depiction of resources in the workspace (data and code available in the IDE to the programmer). However, the quantity of these resources causes the tree diagram to quickly become unreadable and unmanageable. Crude filters are available for filtering out files with certain names or certain parameters. In addition, a programmer can locate a particular file by typing in the first few characters in the file's name. However, neither feature of the IDE helps the programmer locate resources that have features, issues, problems or other criteria that are of interest to the programmer.